Art
From Royalty to Savage- WITH the help of photographs of tombs and manuscripts to supplement the paintings Messrs. Agnew have contrived to collect portraits of all the kings and nearly all the queens of England since the Conquest. Their exhibition is mainly of historical interest, but it is• also remarkable for the number of portraits in it that are good works of art. By far the best of these is the Nicholas Hilliard of Queen Elizabeth, which kills its rival No. 44, by making it seem doubtful whether the latter represents the Queen at all, it being already obvious that it cannot be, as suggested in the catalogue, by Federigo Zuccaro. Of the early portraits that of Richard II is the most important, even though it was presumably not painted till the sixteenth century. The signed Hans Eworth of Queen Mary is a frighteningly realistic rendering and com- pares favourably with the better known Moro portraits. The Stuarts are well represented by a brilliant van Dyck of Queen Henrietta Maria, a pre-English period Lely of Charles II much admired by Pepys, and an uncompromising candlelight Schalcken of William III.
Today Christie's will sell the collection of the late Mr. S. B. Joel, consisting mainly of eighteenth-century English paintings, dominated in quality by Gainsborough, and in quantity by Morland and Romney, by the latter of whom are no fewer than six portraits of Lady Hamilton. Lady Hamilton also supplies the chief associative interest in some of the finest specimens at the exhibition of furniture in the galleries of Messrs. Harris in St. James' Street, which includes three painted side tables presented to her by Nelson.
The North Court at the Victoria and Albert Museum is at present devoted to an exhibition of English Pottery and Porcelain from mediaeval times up to the present day. The exhibition brings out clearly two qualities about English artists ; first, that the less pretentious they are the better their production, and, secondly, that they work well when their hands are closely tied by practical and technical considera- tions. Even in the eighteenth century, when English potters were most ambitious, they were successful in the smaller and simpler kinds of work. It has always been incomprehensible to me that anyone should collect Chelsea figures when they could collect Meissen or Nymphenburg—though the very simple group of a mother and child in the present exhibition has a particular beauty unattained by the continental modellers —and at the present day the figures are the least successful of all the products of the English workshops, the only pieces of merit being the rather light-hearted creations of the Burslem school of art. On the other hand, English potters have produced a continuous stream of good work in the way of unpretentious dishes and jugs, beginning with the late seventeenth-century Bristol and Lambeth dishes with their big and brightly coloured patterns, carried on through the eighteenth century in the Staffordshire ware, and ending with the Wedgwood factory, which shows by its modern productions that the tradition is still active today. In the front hall of the Museum are to be seen specimens from the Eumorfopoulos Collection of Chinese Porcelain and other far eastern objects.
Another pert of the collection is on view in the British Museum, the purpose of both exhibitions being to persuade visitors to contribute towards the very large sum which is being paid for the acquisition of the whole collection for the two museums.
The Burlington Fine Arts Club is holding an exhibition rather outside its usual range and illustrating all kinds of savage arts. From the artistic rather than the ethnographical point of view the fact which emerges from this exhibition is that on the whole the only savage works which keep up the intensity of their appeal on close acquaintance are those which • show a high level of technical efficiency. Many of these idols jolt the spectator at first sight into a considerable excitement, but that excitement is liable to fade if it is not sustained by the perfection of expression which fixes one's
admiration on such things as the best cups from the Congo (97), the West African painted mask (17), the Benin ivory
mask (110), or the two astonishingly realistic masks (76 and 78) from the Queen Charlotte Islands. The possibility of a successful mixture of European influence with native art is vividly shown in the curious seventeenth-century Benin bronze figures representing Portuguese soldiers.
ANTHONY BLUNT.
Previous page
